#BRINGBACKBASEBODYBABES

Hey everyone,

We may have had our Instagram account hacked and have lost everything on our cherished page, but we are still here and ready to find our beloved followers and get back everything we have worked so hard for.

We wanted to share our story with you all here to explain how easily hackings can happen. Here is our story, spoken by Felicia as it is was her that discovered it first.

At 4am yesterday morning (18th July), I woke up to check our Instagram account @basebodybabes. When I tried to view our profile, I realised I had been logged out and the password wasn’t working. Confused and half asleep, I picked up Sebastian's phone and checked the @basebodybabes page. To my absolute surprise I could only see 170 of our 765 images left on the profile. It was so strange, but I thought it was just loading, so I refreshed the page. Then, before my eyes, the images were being deleted one after another, they kept disappearing and within a few minutes, the entire account was deleted and the name was changed to “@dailyfitnessbabes”. I knew straight away it was being hacked! The only thing that remained the same, was our 559,000 followers, but everything else was gone.

I contacted Instagram instantly via email to report the hacking and seek some answers. While I waited for answers from Insta, I couldn't wait any longer, I had to wake up Sebastian and tell him, he jumped out of bed and instantly got on the page and started writing comments, the hacker blocked him straight away. There was nothing we could do. The hacker had stolen EVERYTHING!

I had some minor correspondence with the tech team, but have still had no promise that anything can or will be done to retrieve the account. We are still eagerly awaiting a response from Instagram and although we are staying positive and are hopeful that Instagram will be able to help us regain our account and shut down the hacker, we are not sure that it will be possible. It is so sad to see years of hard work and dedication just disappear into thin air. All of our images, our content, our information, our followers, our likes, our comments, our story, our history, everything... just gone.

We are now ready to start rebuilding our @basebodybabes page. We want it to look exactly like it did before, because we loved our page so much and we think our followers did too. If you have followed us for a while, you will know that our page was a beautifully curated story of our own colour coded images. We have spent countless hours creating our content for the page; researching, styling, photographing and editing the images and we have them all and most of them will be coming back up, so over the next week we will be posting very very regularly reintroducing our content and sharing everything we have to teach as personal trainers, motivators and health and fitness experts.

Unfortunately there is no way to reach our followers as the hacker has blocked us and we can't comment on the page and tell people we are still here. So without the support of our followers that are aware of our story and are willing to share our new account with their followers, we can't actually let them know what happened. All of our followers will just be getting the new spam posts in their feed, but won't know which account it is. We are just hoping we have left enough of a mark in our followers minds, that they think of us and start to search for our page @basebodybabes.

We know it may take a while to spread the word, but we are on a mission to get back all of our 559,000 stolen and very beloved followers. It is not the end of the world for us, some things in life happen that teach you new things. This experience has taught us to be more vigilant with passwords, to protect our property, to back up information and to not just focus on one source of social media. If you are like us and have a business profile on Instagram, use other outlets like your website, blog, Facebook etc to communicate with your readers.

This is just a minor setback for us and nothing that we can't handle. We are so blessed to be living the life we want. We have the best job inspiring and helping people become happier, healthier, fitter, stronger and more confident, we have beautiful friends and supporters backing us with everything that we do, we have several thriving businesses and have comfortable homes to live in, but most importantly, we have the most incredible, loving family to share our lives with and we all have our health and happiness. So we aren't letting this situation bring us down, we are just going to keep on going!

We have started an Instagram campaign called #bringbackbasebodybabes and we have had the most amazing response from fellow Instagrammers, with hundreds of accounts sharing our images and encouraging people to follow us and report the hackers account @finestfitnessgoals. We have been so overwhelmed with the love and support so far and are feeling positive. We will not let one person destroy everything we have worked so hard to develop, we are strong, motivated, passionate women and will be working harder than ever to recreate what was stolen from us.